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‘1998 tests deterred India from punishing Pakistan’

Washington: India was deterred from “punishing” Pakistan after the Kargil war in 1999 and the 2001 attack on Parliament as Islamabad had turned nuclear by then, say U.S. experts.

The 1998 tests had their effect on two major crises between India and Pakistan — Kargil and the attack on Parliament by Pakistani terrorists — in that nuclear weapons inhibited or deterred India from punishing Pakistan, said Professor Devin Hagerty, University of Maryland at Baltimore County. He was speaking at a seminar organised on the 10th anniversary of the 1998 tests.

Bob Einhorn, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of non-proliferation in the Clinton administration, suggested that the explosions signified the “death of universality of the Non-Proliferation Treaty” and eventually lowered the “perceived costs of going nuclear.”

Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, he underscored the strategic magnitude of the tests, calling them a “watershed in nuclear history” in the subcontinent.

“The May 1998 tests ushered in a lengthy period of proliferation pessimism. The tests showed that the universality of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was dead,” Mr. Einhorn, taken as a hawk on non-proliferation matters, told a seminar organised by the Asia Programme of the Centre along with its International Security Studies Programme. — PTI

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